Heinrich Himmler : A Life (46 page)

I have often told you that I shall always strive to ensure that there are no false starts, and that, if at some time in the future there is weak leadership, there will be no gradual fragmentation, in the sense that first of all there’ll be the General-SS, then the protection division; the third function will be a kind of police; the SD will be a kind of criminal or state police; the fifth branch will be an institute for ideological training and a research body—with the result that the order loses its unity and somehow disintegrates into its component parts.
³

‘The entire SS’, as Himmler put it two years later on the same occasion, ‘consists today of numerous branches, various kinds of troop formations and other kinds of institutions. All these things are splendid, but we must make an extraordinarily concerted and conscious effort to ensure that all these sections we have built up always retain a sense of being parts of a whole. [ . . . ] Everyone is first and foremost an SS man; after that he belongs to the General SS, the Verfügungstruppe [armed units], the Death’s Head units, or the SD.’ He therefore asked the Gruppenführer ‘continually to impress on the men and their officer corps that they are only part of a whole and that they count only insofar as the whole counts’.
⁴
As Himmler once again made clear in an address delivered in September 1940, the Waffen-SS could ‘endure only if the SS as a whole endures. If the whole corps really is an order which lives according to its own laws and understands that one part is unthinkable without all the others.’
⁵

In the concept of the ‘order’ or, as he insisted, the ‘clan order’ (
Sippenorden
) based on racial selection Himmler believed he had found the appropriate formula to capture the nature of the SS. In the
SS-Leithefte
(
SS Guidance Booklets
) of 1943 there is an attempt to refine the notion of the SS as an order. There we read: ‘Within the context of a particular world-view an order is that close-knit community whose members surrender complete power over their lives to that world-view and all commit themselves willingly to following its precepts.’ The similarity to Christian orders is no coincidence, the article says, and it is important to recognize that, in spite of the ‘alien and wrong-headed philosophy of life’ that Christian orders cultivate, they brought together ‘people who wished to dedicate their lives to an idealistic and elevated goal’.
⁶

Himmler’s annual November speech of 1936 to the Gruppenführer contains the first mention of his idea of needing another ten years to secure the inner cohesiveness he was aiming for in the SS and police, an idea to which he returned several times the following year.
⁷
Indeed, in the eight-and-a-half years that remained to him as Reichsführer-SS his main focus was to be the internal integration of the SS. He went about this in a variety of ways: organizational measures; the development of a philosophy particular to the SS, created by his establishing a specific SS cult with attendant rituals, symbols, and ‘sacred’ sites; the propagation of a doctrine of virtue specific to the SS; and last but not least, a leadership style that was highly idiosyncratic and yet geared to the conduct of his subordinates.

*

The constant expansion of the SS forced Himmler repeatedly to adapt its command structures. In 1935 he had, as mentioned above, already promoted the three SS Section Offices (
Ämter
) to Main Offices (
Hauptämter
). Now he made further decisions.
⁸
In November 1936 he expanded the chief adjutant’s office, headed by Karl Wolff, into the ‘Personal Staff of the Reichsführer-SS’. Wolff was given the rank of ‘Chief of Staff’.
⁹
The actual adjutancy, headed by Werner Grothmann, was now part of the Personal Staff, as were a Personal Department of the Reichsführer-SS (under Rudolf Brandt), a Chancellery of the Reichsführer-SS, and a gradually increasing number of departments and divisions that in part had a connecting function to the other Main Offices. When in 1939 the Personal Staff was declared a Main Office, Himmler named Wolff retroactively as Head of the Main Office, and in so doing underlined the particular position Wolff’s post had acquired during the previous years.
¹⁰
In addition, a series of departmental heads in the SS Main Office were given posts in Himmler’s Personal Staff and thus were visibly upgraded. For example, Pohl, head of the administrative department in the SS Main Office, was simultaneously ‘administrative director’ of the SS and the head of the medical department, and was given the title ‘Reich Medical Officer SS’.
¹¹

On 9 November 1936 Himmler also redefined the role of the Oberabschnittsführer: now they were assigned to the three Main Offices (and no longer only to the office of the Reichsführer-SS and the SS Main Office), and thus had the task at regional level ‘of safeguarding the unity of the SS order as a whole in accordance with the guidelines laid down by me’, as Himmler put it. ‘I expect of my Oberabschnittsführer that they will not regard this first and foremost as a boost to their power but rather that, as National Socialists and SS men, they will devote themselves to their new and wide-ranging task with a high degree of responsibility and with respect for the great and sometimes neglected achievements of the organizations—the Security Service and the Race and Settlement office—that are put under their direction.’
¹²

The Race and Settlement Main Office under Walter Darré had since 1935 consisted of five departments: the Central Office, the Racial Office (where racial research was conducted), the Indoctrination Office, the Clan Office (responsible for the selection of applicants and permissions to marry), and the Settlement Office.
¹³
The actual headquarters for the SS leadership was the SS Main Office, originally responsible for leadership, administration, personnel administration, and the SS court. After 1933 it accumulated
numerous new tasks, in particular responsibility for the armed SS units, concentration camps, border controls, and officer-training colleges (
Junkerschulen
). In August 1938 it acquired responsibility for indoctrination from the Race and Settlement Main Office.
¹⁴
At the beginning of 1939 the SS Main Office, after the relocation of the Court Office, already consisted of twelve departments.
¹⁵

The SD headquarters under Heydrich, which in 1935 had been elevated to the status of a Main Office, retained its basic structure, and in ensuing years was also organized into three offices: Administration and Organization, Home, and Foreign.
¹⁶
In 1936 new additions were the two Main Offices of the security police (also under Heydrich) and the order police (under Daluege), a configuration that revealed the planned amalgamation of the SS and the police.

In April 1939 two further Main Offices were set up: Himmler named the administrative director of the SS, Oswald Pohl, as head of a new Main Office for Administration and Business, and in addition made him head of a Main Office for Budgeting and Buildings that he placed under the Reich Interior Ministry.
¹⁷
In reality both Main Offices under Pohl functioned as one unit that could act in its capacity as a state or as an SS institution. From 1 June 1939 the two corresponding units in the Personal Staff were made into two independent Main Offices, the Personnel Office and the Court Office.
¹⁸

While in the mid-1930s the General SS was still almost 50 per cent financed from membership dues (an additional special contribution was levied on non-party members) and the payments of patrons, in 1939 Himmler succeeded in having the entire SS budget paid by the Reich Treasurer of the NSDAP, in effect, therefore, from state funds. According to the financial planning documents for 1935, the total SS budget amounted to
c
.15 million Reich marks. In 1936 it was a good 18 million and in 1937 and 1938 around 19 million.
¹⁹
In the mid-1930s, however, Himmler acquired a further source of finance, namely regular donations from an exclusive circle of entrepreneurs and managers from the German business world.

The prehistory of this ‘Friends of the Reichsführer-SS’ organization stretches back to the end of 1927, when the industrialist Wilhelm Keppler was asked by Hitler to assemble a consultative group on economic matters. Up to the takeover of power this relatively informal group had met three or four times. Their discussions did not, however, make any impact to speak of
on the NSDAP programme. Keppler, Kurt Freiherr von Schröder, and other members of the circle had, on the other hand, played an important role in creating the contacts that led in late 1932 and early 1933 to soundings concerning a Hitler–von Papen government. Himmler knew Keppler at the latest from this period.
²⁰

After the takeover of power Hitler had made Keppler his economic adviser, though without creating for him a central role in the development of economic policy. The ‘Keppler Circle’ instead looked to the leadership of the SS. In March 1933 Himmler admitted the industrialist into the SS as a Standartenführer,
²¹
and soon the circle was called ‘Friends of the Reichsführer-SS’.
²²
Meetings became more frequent, until from 1939 onwards they occurred almost once a month.
²³
At the meetings there were lectures on political, economic, and cultural topics. Himmler, who determined the membership himself,
²⁴
took part frequently in the meetings in the first years, giving lectures about police matters and ancestral research or taking the members on a tour of a concentration camp; in 1936, for example, they went to Dachau. In 1937 they were the guests of the Berlin police department.
²⁵
After the outbreak of war Himmler’s appearances at the meetings of his ‘friends’ grew less and less frequent, and from 1940 they evidently ceased altogether. Nevertheless, in December 1943 the Friends went on a three-day excursion from Berlin to Himmler’s East Prussian military headquarters, where the Reichsführer informed his guests about the range of his responsibilities.
²⁶

In 1939 the Friends were thirty-six members strong. Among them, in addition to Keppler and Schröder, were leading representatives of German business such as Rudolf Bingel, the chief executive and chair of the board of Siemens–Schuckert, Heinrich Bütefisch, board member of IG Farben, Friedrich Flick, chief executive of Mitteldeutsche Stahlwerke, Karl Ritter von Halt, member of the board of the Deutsche Bank, and Hans Walz, managing director of Robert Bosch. In addition there were high-ranking representatives from the steel and machine-manufacturing industries, banking and insurance, and the shipping industry. Hermann Behrends and Oswald Pohl, as representatives of the SS, were also members, as was Carl Vincent Krogmann, the incumbent mayor of the city of Hamburg, as well as representatives of various ministries, the Reich Bank, and party administration.
²⁷

In 1936 Himmler appears to have asked the Friends to make donations to the SS for cultural and social purposes. The sum raised in 1936 is estimated
at 600,000 Reich marks, and by 1939–40 rose to a good 1 million Reich marks per year.
²⁸
The funds were clearly used for special tasks, for example, to fit out the Wewelsburg (of which more later), or to support projects of the Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) organization or the Lebensborn (Spring of Life) association. The Friends boosted the Reichsführer-SS’s reputation in business circles and conversely opened up to its members the possibility of approaching one of the leading representatives of the regime with projects—or of making money through the extensive programme of Aryanization.
²⁹

Finally, Himmler’s efforts to build up a comprehensive organization were completed by the founding of businesses owned by the SS. In addition to various workshops in concentration camps and the manufacture, developed since 1938, of construction materials (these have already been discussed
³⁰
), in the 1930s Himmler supported a series of smaller businesses that served a wide variety of purposes. All these businesses were managed from the Personal Staff office.

One example was the Magdeburg publishing house Nordland, which specialized in bringing out ideologically relevant writings. Another was Anton Loibl, a private limited company founded in 1936, with the help of which Hitler’s chauffeur, an acquaintance of Himmler’s, developed the application of a patent for pedal-operated reflectors, which since 1937 had been mandatory for bicycles. A considerable part of the profit was diverted to the SS’s ‘academic research’ organization, the Ahnenerbe, and to the Lebensborn association. In 1937 the private limited company Friedrich Franz Bauer was created as a way of enabling the man in question, a personal friend of Himmler, to disseminate his photographs.
³¹

The Allach porcelain factory set up by Himmler in January 1936 had a peculiar position among the SS businesses. In addition to Karl Diebitsch, a kind of personal adviser to Himmler on matters of taste, who was brought into the Personal Staff as a specialist in art and design, three further SS members were involved as founders of the firm.
³²
These four straw men were, however, forced to surrender their share of the business in October 1939 to Pohl, who incorporated it in German Economic Enterprises (
Deutsche Wirtschaftsbetriebe
= DWB).

Situated in the north of Munich, Allach saw itself not as an economic enterprise but as a ‘state manufactory’.
³³
Two-thirds of its production went to the SS, the police, and the Wehrmacht.
³⁴
The SS benefited from large discounts, as a result of which the manufactory ran in the early years at a
loss.
³⁵
Himmler planned to make good the losses after the war with the help of profits from a large agricultural estate, and intended by this means to grant the Reichsführer-SS in perpetuity an ‘unlimited right to make gifts’ of the Allach products.
³⁶
During the war he had the workforce replaced to a great extent by prisoners from Dachau concentration camp, which was nearby.
³⁷